‘I watched as she peered through the lamp-lit gloom at the shackled man who stared back at her. Thyestes had used the edge of my sword to sever the tethers at his wrists and he was holding the sword still, so I was afraid for both of us. But though nothing was said for what felt like a very long time, it was immediately clear to me that they recognized each other. Eventually Thyestes croaked out my mother’s name, almost as though he were asking her a question. I couldn’t see my mother’s face because it was buried at his shoulder but I caught the glisten of tears at his eyes. “Pelopia,” he asked hoarsely “this sword that you gave to your son, how did you come by it?”
‘He was holding up the sword in the lamp-light so that she could see the pommel and the chased engraving on the blade. She turned her face away and then looked down at her feet as she said, “It was dropped by the stranger who raped me on the night when I last made the offering to Artemis at Sicyon.” She reached out and took the sword from her father’s hand. “The sword was his,” she said, gazing down at the blade with revulsion in her eyes. “I gave it to my son in the hope that one day he might avenge my honour.’”
Aegisthus drew in his breath. ‘I knew nothing of any of this,’ he said. ‘I can only assume that my mother must have been waiting until I was nearer manhood before telling me her story. But the gods were impatient for the truth to be known. I was still trying to cope with the shock when I heard Thyestes say, “Pelopia, the sword is mine.’”
Clytaemnestra saw Aegisthus wince at the memory. There came a long silence, which again, out of a tact that was now touched with a surprising measure of compassion for the tormented man across from her, she chose not to break.
‘From that moment things are not so clear to me,’ Aegisthus said eventually. ‘I felt bewildered by the tension between them in that awful place. I was trembling and I could feel the hairs bristling at my neck as though I was in the presence of a god. Then even before I could understand what was happening, my mother had turned the sword on herself and with a single thrust pushed the blade deep into her stomach. I can see her body swaying as she stares up into Thyestes’ face. He is looking back at her, reaching out his hands when she begins to fall. Then they are both slumped on the stone flags of the floor and I can see blood shining like oil in the lamp-light as it seeps into the cracks between the stones. I wanted to be gone from there to a place where I could tell myself that none of this had happened, that it was a nightmare come to trouble my sleep, but my limbs wouldn’t move. I was fixed there like a statue of myself, unable to think, unable to feel, scarcely able to breathe. And then, somehow, Thyestes was staring into my face. I could see the hairs in his nostrils. I could smell his breath and see his teeth as he spoke. He had my thin arms gripped so tightly in his hands that I knew they must leave bruises there. I could see my mother’s blood spattered on his clothes and chest. My teeth were chattering. I think my whole body must have been shaking. I could hear what he was saying and it made no sense to me. He was telling me that he and I were father and son and that my mother was also my sister. He insisted that he, not Atreus, was my true father, and we were both, therefore, monsters. A monstrous father embracing his monstrous son. My mother lay between us with my sword protruding from her stomach. I watched as he gripped it by the hilt and pulled out the blade with a soft puckering of sound in the silence of that place. A fresh spurt of blood burst out across the floor. I was staring at it when Thyestes grabbed me by the chin and fixed me with his gaze. He demanded to know what name they had given me, and when I gasped it out between my chattering teeth he said, “Well, Aegisthus, you are faced with the first and most important decision of your accursed young life. You must take back your sword and do one of two things with it. Either you can do what you came here to do and plunge it into my flesh, and this time I will not try to prevent you because you will be bringing an end to all my evil days. Or you can use it to kill the man who sent you here to murder me.” He was staring so intently into my eyes that I could not look away from him and he must have divined the confusion of my thoughts because he said, “Be assured that Atreus is not your father.” Then he gravely offered me the sword.’
Aegisthus stared into space remembering how cold he had felt in that moment. Cold and immensely powerful — a child given absolute power in a world in which the adults knew only how to hate each other. For a few seconds he had felt utterly free to choose. And then, only a moment later, he had known himself under a compulsion that left him with no choice at all. He saw Pelopia lying dead in her blood on the stone floor and Thyestes standing over her, and he knew that the three of them were caught in the trap of their terrible consanguinity. In a place prior to reason, older even than thought, he knew that the three of them were all one flesh; that they were an unholy family living and dying inside a trap that had been set for them by a malevolent fate.
‘And there was no escape,’ he said. ‘I would do what my true father told me to do. I would return to Atreus with the bloody sword, claiming that I had done his will and murdered his brother Thyestes. And then, when his back was turned, perhaps in the very moment when he was making a thankful offering to the gods he worshipped, I would take that sword and drive it with all my strength up through his back and into his lungs and heart. And in so doing I would have fulfilled the Delphic oracle and avenged my father on his enemy.’
‘And in that moment,’ Clytaemnestra whispered urgently, ‘tell me, what did you feel?’
Aegisthus looked up, aware suddenly of the almost sensual appetite with which she waited for his answer. ‘Now I shall disappoint you,’ he said, ‘for the truth is that I felt very little. I think that by then I was beyond all feeling as I was beyond all thought.
Without understanding what was happening to me, I had become an instrument of fate as devoid of moral consciousness as was my sword itself. Perhaps I had given my whole being over to my sword, the sword that Thyestes had purchased with the intention of killing his brother all those years before. The sword he had held at his daughter’s throat when he ravished her. The sword with which the mother of his child had killed herself that night. And the sword which I now thrust into the back of the man whom I once believed to be my father and who I now knew to be a greater monster than my true father had ever been. And I did it with no sense of triumph. Nor even with much in the way of fear; merely with the dull certainty that my misbegotten life had fulfilled the purpose for which it was created and it would not greedy matter if I died for it.’
‘But you did not die,’ Clytaemnestra smiled.
‘No, I did not die. There were men in Mycenae who were still loyal to Thyestes, and others who blamed the crime of Atreus for all the evil fortune that had fallen on the city. When my father was released from his shackles and the news spread that Atreus was dead, these people quickly rallied to his cause. By daybreak Thyestes was King in Mycenae and I was honoured as his heir. Agamemnon and Menelaus went into hiding and were eventually smuggled out of the city by their friends. Had he been wiser, Thyestes would have hunted them down before they left, but I think he was troubled by the thought that they too might be his sons by Aerope, and he was reluctant to risk bringing the guilt of their deaths on his head. It was a mistake, of course, as he learned to his cost years later when they came to Mycenae with the Spartan army of King Tyndareus at their backs and took the city by treachery. It was my turn then to flee for my life.’
‘But again,’ Clytaemnestra said, ‘you did not die.’
‘No, it seems that the gods still had a use for me.’
But Clytaemnestra did not answer his smile. She said, ‘Can you still believe in the gods after all you have suffered in this life?’ ‘It seems to me that there are two possibilities,’ Aegisthus answered coolly. ‘Either there are divine powers who see more deeply into things than we do and who shape our destinies in larger ways than we can conceive in order to work their justice in the world; or there is no meaning and no justice in our lives and we are merely the absurd creatures of our own a
ppetites and ignorance. If I am honest with you, I have to say that I have no idea which of these versions of the world is truly the case. But in either dispensation I am content to follow my own will rather than bow to the will of any other man. And because it seems to me that if the gods do exist, it would be a foolish man who failed to honour them, I make my offerings to Artemis, as the divine incarnation of that savage power which I see at work in the world around me whichever way I turn my eyes.’
To his satisfaction Aegisthus saw the woman across from him nodding as he spoke. ‘However,’ he added smiling, ‘I recognize that in so doing I may be worshipping nothing more than a ruthless drive for life inside myself. Is not that, after all, why you invited me here?’
‘It is,’ Clytaemnestra assented, content in the knowledge that she had found the perfect instrument of her own cold-minded passions.
Getting up from her couch, she crossed the marble floor to stand before him and took between her own hands the hand on which he wore the serpent ring that she had sent to him. ‘Now come,’ she whispered, lifting that hand and pressing it to her breast, ‘let you and I cleave together as these serpents do. And I shall help you to have your justice as you shall help me to have mine.’
And in the cold stones that lay behind the painted plaster of the chamber she had made beautiful, all the ghosts of Mycenae were stirring as she spoke.
The Bitch’s Tomb
Even as the Argive ships pushed out into the bay of Troy it became clear that Poseidon would grant them no easy passage home. The weather had darkened since the night of the earth-tremor. Blackish-grey clouds, bullied across the sky by a hard wind out of the east, had broken into rain, and many of the vessels were so laden with spoil that they began to ship water even before they broached the mouth of the Hellespont. Once out on the open sea, the wind gathered force and as ships tipped and yawed among the waves, men regretted that they had not followed the examples of Menelaus and Nestor and left Troy two days earlier. Soon they began to fear both for their treasure and their lives.
Odysseus had thought twice before putting out to sea that day; but he could smell lasting trouble on the wind and wanted to be away from Troy, so he decided to risk the crossing back to Argos rather than be kept landlocked on that desolate shore. Yet unlike Diomedes and Idomeneus, who chose to risk the direct crossing by way of Lemnos, Odysseus remained with Agamemnon’s fleet as it hugged the coast between Imbros and the long peninsula of Thrace. The voyage home would certainly take longer by that route, but he hoped that a few additional days at sea might allow time for his troubled mind to settle once more. He was as haunted now by the dream that had come to him on the night of the tremor as he was by his memories of the slaughter in Troy. Once or twice he had found himself washing obsessively as though a tide of blood kept rising through his skin. At other times he trembled uncontrollably. More deeply than ever he yearned for Penelope’s embrace, but he was convinced that she must recoil from the hot broil of anger, guilt and self-disgust still swirling inside him. So he shied from the thought of presenting himself before his wife, and kept to himself as much as possible, hoping that time might quieten the turmoil in his mind.
While his crew strained at the oar-benches under shortened sail, their captain stood at the stern, staring back at where thick smoke still rose from the ruins of the city. The conflagration had been so vast, and its heat so tremendous, that it had taken on the force and scale of a natural disaster; but there was nothing natural about that murky haze. A world was burning there and men had set fire to it. The smoke billowing upwards from the ruins across a livid sky seemed to reflect the darkness still burning in his mind. It sickened him to look at it.
But when he turned away he saw Queen Hecuba standing at the rigging with her silver-grey hair blowing about her face. She said, ‘Do you think the gods will look with favour on your work, Odysseus of Ithaca?’
To the best of his knowledge this was the first coherent sentence the old woman had spoken since the murder of her daughter Polyxena. Nor had she eaten since the fall of the city and her once majestic features were scrawny and hollow now. She looked less like a queen than a mad woman such as could be seen hanging about temple courtyards, chanting prophecies and beseeching alms. Yet there was an unforgiving sanity in the accusation of her eyes.
‘I do not presume to speak for the gods,’ Odysseus answered.
‘Then speak for yourself,’ she demanded. ‘Are you proud of what you’ve done?’
‘I take pride in the courage of my friends,’ he prevaricated.
‘And if you were to come home,’ she said, ‘and find that your son had been murdered and your wife carried off into slavery - would you still take pride in what men such as these can do?’
Odysseus made the sign to ward off evil and turned his face away from her.
‘Be careful of what you say, old woman, or I’ll have you kept below decks where no one can hear you.’
Hecuba brushed the hair from her gaunt cheeks. ‘You find the truth of things too painful? Then perhaps one day we will understand one another, you and I.’
She gazed back at the burning city again and winced as a twisting pillar of lurid smoke gushed skywards from the citadel of Ilium. For a moment the despair in her face was so intense that he thought she might pull herself up by the rigging and throw herself over the side. But Hecuba remained where she was, rising and falling with each lurch of the ship, watching Troy vanish in charred ruins and a smear of smoke. She began to sing then, a low, heart-stirring lament for the city and its exterminated world. Her knuckles whitened at the yards. The grief in her song lifted on the stiff breeze, carrying across the oar-benches for all to hear, and when the women cowering beneath the afterdeck saw that Odysseus could not bring himself to silence her, they too joined in the refrain.
So the ship passed on past Cape Sigeum out of the bay of Troy. The scarlet prow of The Fair Return dipped and climbed among the white-caps but with no hint of triumph in her progress or any sign of the joy that might have come from the thought of returning home. Even the coarsest man aboard seemed burdened by a doleful sense of the transience of things.
They had not been long at sea when the wind turned and it became ever harder to make way through the swell. Hours passed in a backbreaking, slow tussle against wind and waves. Odysseus knew that they would have to put in at some haven before nightfall but this coastline remained hostile terrain. Throughout the ten years of the war only Achilles had seen much success fighting along the Thracian shore, and plenty of men in the Argive ships nursed bad memories of hard-fought encounters in these parts. Queen Hecuba was herself the daughter of a Thracian king, and though many of her father’s warriors had died fighting for Troy, many more of the most ferocious tribesmen in the known world remained to guard their homeland against Argive marauders. Yet the seas were too high to risk the rigours of this coastline by darkness when the ships would be little more to each other than an unstable constellation of oil-lamps flickering in the blackness of the Aegean night.
Then, in the late afternoon, the small pinnace that Agamemnon used for delivering messages throughout the fleet pulled up alongside The Fair Return. The herald Talthybius stood clutching the rigging with one hand while holding the other cupped at his mouth against the wind. ‘The fleet can put in safely here on the Thracian Chersonese,’ he shouted. ‘King Polymnestor has declared an end to hostilities rather than risk what he thinks might be a full-scale invasion.’
‘You’re sure about this?’ Odysseus shouted back.
‘Absolutely. He’s given the High King proof of his shift in loyalties. Signal your ships to follow you into shore. There’s to be a feast tonight.’
The pinnace put its head about to approach the Locrian ships that were battling the swell further out towards Imbros. The helmsman pushed over the steering oar of The Fair Return to make for the shore and, having seen to the trimming of the sail, Odysseus went down to lend a hand at the oars. As he was settling himself at the bench he he
ard an anxious muttering and suppressed moans from the Trojan women under the afterdeck. He could make out nothing distinctly except two names - Polymnestor and Polydorus. Clearly the women had heard what Talthybius had said and the news was causing consternation among them. But then Odysseus was heaving on the oar and could hear nothing more above the creak of the rowlocks and the slap of the waves against the side of the ship.
By the time The Fair Return made landfall on the Thracian Chersonese, Agamemnon’s Mycenaeans were already pitching their tents outside the fortified stronghold which was the hilltop citadel of King Polymnestor. The camp was only lightly guarded and the troops seemed relaxed enough, so Odysseus made his way to Agamemnon’s tent to discover how this unexpectedly friendly welcome had come about.
‘Panic,’ Agamemnon answered, smiling, when he looked up from where his scribe was penning a brief despatch that would be carried by pigeon back to Clytaemnestra in Mycenae. ‘The destruction of Troy has shaken everyone’s nerves in these parts and our progress has been watched all along the coast. Polymnestor must have thought we were planning to launch an attack against him because he hadn’t expected the fleet to come this way. And it turns out that he had a particular reason to fear my wrath.’
Irritated by the complacent smirk on Agamemnon’s face, Odysseus wilfully declined to ask what that reason might be. He was remembering how this man had swollen like a bullfrog to receive the triumphant acclaim of the host outside Troy. He was remembering how the King of Men had dragged his own reluctant figure up before the Scaean Gate to share in that acclaim. He had no interest in yielding him further satisfactions.
Aware of the rebuff but refusing to be discomposed by it, Agamemnon pressed the lion stamp of his signet-ring into the seal of the missive and dismissed the scribe. ‘Have you heard of Priam’s youngest son Polydorus?’ he asked.
The Return From Troy Page 14